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> we also improved performance because ZFS could decompress reads faster than the disk could read

This is my favorite side effect of compression in the right scenarios. I remember getting a huge speed up in a proprietary in-memory data structure by using LZO (or one of those fast algorithms) which outperformed memcpy, and this was already in memory so no disk io involved! And used less than a third of the memory.

The performance gain from compression (replacing IO with compute) is not ironic, it was seen as a feature for the various NAS that Sun (and after them Oracle) developped around ZFS.

How do you get a PostgreSQL database to grow to one petabyte? The maximum table size is 32 TB o_O

Probably by using partitioning.

Cumulative; dozens of machines with a combined database size over a PB even though each box only had like 20 TB.